There is romance in my soul after all. 😉
The past few Sunday evenings, I’ve been watching a wonderful British program on PBS. It’s called Last Tango In Halifax. It’s a story about two old pensioners who meet and rekindle their childhood friendship. The rekindling goes so well, they are soon planning to be wed. The series follows Celia and Alan, played excellently by Anne Reid and Derek Jacobi, and their immediate families and a few odd friends, as they all plod through their respective joys and catastrophes. You’ll laugh and cry all during the too-fast hour of each episode.
This is great TV, folks. The acting and writing on this series is just fabulous. Give it a go, if you get the chance. Previous episodes are available online at PBS’s site. And you can probably get the DVDs from your local libraries sometime soon. Each week leaves me craving the next week’s episode; the sure sign of a great show.
Enjoy!
Later…
~Eric
Nocturnal Slacker v2.0 
Thanks for the recommendation, Eric. We were seeing ads for the show as we’ve been watching Silk and other Masterpiece Mystery series lately. We definitely need the close captioning on those shows to make sure we catch all the dialog! Unfortunately understanding the words doesn’t always give us all the meaning, but we do figure it out eventually. Often find myself with a dictionary open while we the show to see if we can figure out what they are communicating! … a bit like learning a new language.
I’ve watched British TV shows since I was a kid. It takes some practice to train your ears, but you eventually realize that they really are speaking English. 😉
I missed the first episode of Last Tango but am watching now and enjoying it. I haven’t had too many problems with understanding the characters’ dialog on that or on Silk, but what has really frustrated me is Broadchurch, another British mystery mini-series being shown by BBC America (I have an extensive cable package because my mother is housebound and TV and reading are important). In particular, the lead detective in Broadchurch is Scottish, and I can understand maybe 20% of what he says. I’ve had to resort to closed captioning on that show!
HAHA! I once had a couple Scottish lady friends online. I met them both for a long weekend at another lady’s home in South Carolina back in ’03. Their thick Scottish accents definitely took a bit of getting used to. I spent the first few hours with them embarrassed by my repeated requests for them to repeat themselves. I blamed it on being mostly deaf in one ear, but the accent was a goodly bit of the problem for me. I got used to the cadence and vocabulary pretty quickly after that, though; then it was a pleasure to listen to them talk. I miss them both. 😦 They faded away from my little online circle of friends a few years back.
I’m loving this show as well. There are so many interesting characters and so much action packed into each day. We are on episode 5, day 5, with these intertwined families now and it’s been nonstop fascinating.
Yes, the plot is pretty busy in this show. It amazes me how screwed up people’s lives can be. The quality of the writing on this show is just stupendous; perfectly matched to the acting talents, too. There were a couple surprises in this past Sunday’s episode. I can hardly wait for the next episodes. I can almost guarantee I’ll be watching this show on DVDs sometime in the future, also.
Thanks for reading and commenting! 🙂
~Eric